SCREENING IN THE BERNARD OSHER FOUNDATION AUDITORIUM
Screens as part of “Inside/Outside,” a series of films expanding on the questions posed by “Outside the Frame: Todd Webb in Africa.”
“Formally spartan, Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl is dense with cool fury.”
80 minutes (Black Girl: 65 minutes/Jojolo: 14 minutes.) Not Rated. Directed by Ousmane Sembène/Lebert Bethune. In French with English subtitles.
Black Girl
Ousmane Sembène, one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived and the most internationally renowned African director of the twentieth century, made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl (La noire de . . .). Sembène, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple plot—about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white couple and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a figurative and literal prison—into a complex, layered critique on the lingering colonialist mindset of a supposedly postcolonial world. Featuring a moving central performance by Mbissine Thérèse Diop, Black Girl is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement—and one of the essential films of the 1960s.
Jojolo
A subtle study of cultural identity following a graceful young woman of Haitian descent who works as a fashion model and actress in cosmopolitan Paris. Cool, light, and lyrical in style, Bethune’s portrait has a deft thematic touch.
PMA Films would like to thank African Film Festival, Inc. for their invaluable assistance in curating “Inside/Outside.”